There’s some hype growing now around Marathon, although it seems that there’s been some mix up about it.
Tom Henderson got the ball rolling but his earlier tweets got misconstrued. But we will paraphrase Tom Henderson here and here, and Paul Tassi here.
The rumor is Bungie will be announcing Marathon’s closed alpha, including sign up details, during or after the gameplay preview at the end of this week. They announced the preview just as this week got started. There really isn’t any ‘shadow drop.’ They’ve had closed alpha and pre-alpha tests for some time already, and they will be opening up sign-ups sometime after this preview.
In spite of the mix-up, there’s sufficient reason to be excited about all these rumors. Bungie fans have been itching to learn about their next game after Destiny 2. Some older fans may even remember the days of Marathon being a Mac corridor shooter, and being eager to reenter this world, alternate timeline or not.
While a lot of rightful skepticism has been thrown at Bungie, especially in the months leading to and after the release of Destiny 2: The Final Shape, there is real reason to believe Marathon will turn out OK. Bungie had some content creators participate in in-person previews and testing of Marathon in their offices all the way back in October 2024, and the buzz coming out of that event was positive. To be clear, Bungie didn’t instruct those players to make videos, and in fact all they could confirm was that they went to Bungie offices and were shown ‘something.’
But a few days afterwards, Joe Ziegler went on-screen to share the first tangible details of Marathon’s development. This was when Ziegler promised that the community would get to participate and help develop Marathon in 2025. While these are still rumors, we may confirm at the end of this week that Ziegler and Bungie are making good on that promise from a few months ago.
There are certainly reasons to be concerned, from the bad press surrounding Bungie, and another Sony produced live service game, Concord. One may also make connections to when Ubisoft’s XDefiant seemed to benefit from community playtesting, only for Ubisoft to close down the game less than a year after its launch. We can acknowledge all these things to be true, but still be hopeful that Bungie, with the community’s help, can shape Marathon into something that could be a success for Bungie and Sony.
It will all certainly be about the execution, but if you believe in Bungie, and want to see them succeed, your chance to tangibly, directly help them may be coming up soon.
